Answer
A person who acts within a justifying circumstance under Article 11 of the Revised Penal Code — such as self-defense, defense of a relative, or defense of a stranger — does not incur criminal liability, because the law considers the act lawful rather than merely excused. It follows that, as a rule, there is also no civil liability arising from the act, since no crime is deemed to have been committed.
The recognized exception is the state of necessity in paragraph 4 of Article 11 (causing damage to avoid a greater evil or injury). Under Article 101, in that situation there is no criminal liability, but civil liability attaches to the persons who benefited from the act, in proportion to the benefit they received. The distinction matters: justification removes the crime, but the law still allocates the loss where someone was spared a greater harm.
Researching Philippine law? Intellegal brings Philippine case-law search, statute and issuance exploration, multi-dimension case comparison, document visualization, and cited deep-research reports into a single workflow — with every citation traced back to its original source, so you can verify each answer rather than take it on trust. Every authority it surfaces links back to its original provision or decision, so you can open the source and confirm the wording yourself, and save or export the questions and reports you reference most. See the full report for the statutes and cases behind this answer, or explore the related questions below.